So you build a house on a “plain”, install a sceptic tank and then moan like hell that the government aren’t doing enough to clear up YOUR faeces that’s floating around your kitchen??

Ok troll mode off for second. But who’s responsibility is it to dredge local rivers that no longer have commercial reasons to dredge? Should I be paying through my tax dollars for the environment agency to dredge the river parrot?

It’s not that simple but partly, yes, newer houses have been built on land previously left alone (and that was cheap, and available)..

House in “Water Meadow Close” ? no thanks…

by that raionale i suppose we should just abandon all of the fens?

by that raionale i suppose we should just abandon all of the fens?

No complaints there.

Yours,

A Fen Tiger.

You could argue the same about spending taxes on cancer treatment for smokers or A&E for MTBers who crash and hurt themselves…

Society is about spreading risk and give and take….

Although I’m all for re-flooding the fens as long as they fence it off first so no one can escape before hand…

At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases.

At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases.

Or the councillors who approved it as part of the local development plan….

At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases.

Or the councillors who approved it as part of the local development plan….

Or the financiers who funded and ensured the profitability of such development

No complaints there.

Yours,

A Fen Tiger.

I didn’t have you down as a fen dweller?

I didn’t have you down as a fen dweller?

He was cast out when the locals declared his Photoshop skills ‘witchcraft’.

eddiebaby – Member
At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases planning officers who permitted the developments.

Amended for you.

I’m not sure what to make of the whole ‘if the rivers were dredged it’d be fine/we haven’t had flooding like this in living memory’ thing. With the amount of rainfall over the past two years (not just January) water levels have been incredibly high, so I’m not entirely convinced dredging would have made a difference, at the end of the day extreme weather events are called so because they don;t happen very often, and when they do the results are bad.

In terms of development it’s a case of risk versus cost and demand. You can design a structure to withstand just about anything, but it will be uneconomic, getting the balance right is the tricky part.

planning officers advise. councillors are the ones that can overturn and vote to proceed (depending on external influences, their collective wisdom, &c).

Was the flood plain there before you bought a house?

If the answer is yes, then I have very little sympathy, it’s why I bought a house on a hill. (In a historical coal mining area – if it falls into a sink hole that’s my problem, as should their soggy carpets be)

I bought a house on a hill partly for the same reason but I still don’t want to see the shops at the bottom of the hill underwater. Building new developments on a flood plain now does seem like utter madness though.

Hydrologists always live at the top of a hill
They clearly know something ………..

Responsibility of the builder as far as I’m concerned- if you make a faulty car, you don’t blame the regulators for letting you sell it, or the customer for being stupid enough to buy it, the buck stops with them.

Responsibility of the builder as far as I’m concerned- if you make a faulty car, you don’t blame the regulators for letting you sell it, or the customer for being stupid enough to buy it, the buck stops with them.

The builder just builds what he’s told to build. The architect designs to the developers brief, which is driven by… a demand for houses on a flood plain.

If there was no demand, they wouldn’t be built. So don’t buy a house on a flood plain 🙄

Thing is, houses in the Fens haven’t flooded, as Ver Muyden knew what he was doing. Water will always go where water has always gone, such as in Yalding. Flood defences merely delay the inevitable, letting the gullible and the greedy get caught out by nature just as they thought they had finally tamed her.

We all funded the Thames barrier to stop London flooding, it seems only fair to stump up for the rest of the country.

At least let us shoot the surveyors who signed off on the purchases.

Or the councillors who approved it as part of the local development plan….

Or the financiers who funded and ensured the profitability of such development

And any pensioners who received pensions based on the profitability of these developments to their pension funds.

40mpg – Member

The builder just builds what he’s told to build

Fair point, should have said developer.

I won’t link to daily mail, but Michael Evis has witten a good article about dredging on the Somerset levels.

Havent seen the article but dredging on the Somerset levels may have improved the flooding by about 10% and had a catastrophic effect on the environmental aspects of the rivers, you cant have it both ways.

Who is going to pay for this work to be done, out budget has been slashed in the last 4 years and the mantra “Do more with less” is getting really dull. We are going to lose 1800 members of staff by November 10% of workforce.

The levels are a drained swamp and the rain has been unprecented, yesterdays Mail headline was one of the most disingenous things I have ever seen. The histrionics of the local MP is just sad.

Bringing in the army is a knee jerk reaction to be seen to be doing something by politicians who dont really understand the problem.

They’re taking very serious though and I have declared War on Water there’s even live updates.

Tweets by WaronWater

^+1 million. The ideological political slanging match is very annoying and frustrating for everyone who works in this field. There has been no evidence or science in any of the media reports (return period of event, comparisons with historical events, quantification of the effect dredging might have had and the consequences of such, etc).

I feel for those who have flooded, but this is a very rare occurence. I also feel for those working in the EA, local Council and similar services who are being slatted, when they generally do a fantastic job under very difficult circumstances.

It’s a tricky one, I can’t see that dredging will make that much difference, look at how much water there is, many times the river’s capacity, even if dredged. Defences just move the water somewhere else and flood that.

You shouldn’t build on a flood plain, that’s the bottom line.

By the power of the tin-ter-web the flooded Somerset village constantly in the news was recorded as Micelenie in the Domesday book meaning ‘the increasingly great island’ from the Old English miclian.

So the thick end of a thousand years ago this part of the UK flooded and sadly for the people who choose to live there today sometimes in the UK its rains… …a lot.

Mind you that doesn’t excuse this and previous Government’s for abandoning rain/river maintenance/management over the last 20+ years, whilst wasting £Ms on ‘environmental’ pet projects.

Good to see the Army is now on the case, expect to see progress soon!

By the time the water is in the river it’s too late. All dredging does it make the flood arrive more quickly. We should be re-foresting the uplands to retain the water on the land. Wooded areas take up about 20 times more water than grassland but our current environment secretary is a Luddite and will not take the time to learn about his brief properly. There aaas a good article in the Guarniad at the weekend on just this subject.

The ones that **** me off more than anything are the ones where you hear their home has flooded before, but they’re complaining that their newly hand laid £5k wooden floor is destroyed 👿

Speaking as a Somerset native (albeit one from higher ground), I look forward to an outraged Fail article on why King Canute should have made more of an effort to hold back the tide.

Nicked this from another forum…

Obviously dredging works to alleviate local flooding, it just sends the problem downstream to someone else. The problem for the Somerset Levels (which I lived on the edge of for 44 years) is that they are at the downstream end of the line, there is nowhere downstream to send the problem to.

When all the land is less than 6 foot above sea level and the flood banks are up to 12 foot above the land your are fecked once the flood banks overtop. You can’t pump the water off the land back into the river channels until it stops raining.

Dredging to drop the bed level will be of no help when the river beds are already at, below or only just above sea level. It would take a huge dredging effort to even double the volume of the river/drain channels but this would make almost no difference because the volume of water flowing down is thousands of times the channel volume.

The problems for the levels are miles upstream in the ever expanding towns and villages which speed up run off. All the agricultural land drainage, maize growing and hedge ripping out doesn’t help either. I can’t recall the exact figures but I think it is something like every 1 acre of the levels receives the water from 6 acres of hills. The only real hope is to slow the runoff from the upstream areas.

my neighbours live on a flood plain in a meander – in a house called “the old mill”

they have flood defences in place – its called – when the river gets high – move shit up stairs.

sockets and cabling are all high up – and the floor and wall are tiled.

water comes in – water goes out – floors and walls are mopped.

repeat.

its not for me – but the house was cheap 😀

‘the increasingly great island’

Somerset was pushing the limits of rad ‘shore gnar long before the Canucks.

Just read Michael Evis dit in the daily whale

Environment Secretary Owen Paterson and his civil service underlings seem keener to spend millions protecting river oysters, water voles and umpteen species of birds than a single penny on protecting the hard-working farming families who are just trying to make an honest living from the land.

and

When Mr Paterson came to the area at the weekend he brought a police escort but no wellington boots.

Ok troll mode off for second. But who’s responsibility is it to dredge local rivers that no longer have commercial reasons to dredge? Should I be paying through my tax dollars for the environment agency to dredge the river parrot?

The Levels were first drained by the Romans, and Domesday records that the area was widely settled from the 11th century onwards.

So do we forcibly evict the inhabitants of this area because of decisions made more than 1,000 years ago? Or perhaps stop being so effing tight and pay a very small amount so that their homes and amenities can be properly protected.

So we want sterile rivers and land and 1000 cow dairy units. 🙄

Evis should know better, farmer biting the hand that feeds, amazing.

He did seem to have nice brand new blue Barbour – rural fail I’m afraid.

Agree about dredging – doesn’t that just reduce the lag time and the eventual amplitude of the discharge curve? In practice, how does that stop this happening in the levels. As tango man put it, should the attention be upstream and slowing the run-off there?

Evis is an idiot. He’s upstream of the levels, his farming practices are contributing to this water in the levels not that he seems able to see it.

No one is against spending money to solve problems, the point is dredging wont work so its a waste of money.

However, faced with 25 sq miles of flooding and the wettest january since records began there isn’t actually much you can spend money on to fix this. Thats why climate change is a bitch.

man 0 – nature 1

A lot of contractors will make money out of the dredging while EA’s plant will sit idle.